Song for night chris abani essays

That awakening for Springsteen — to the beauty of America, and to the promises and improbabilities of the American Dream — entered his writing in the late-'70s and early '80s; Bruce himself traces the subject back to Darkness on the Edge of Town . And that's where it appears here, as he introduces a jangly "The Promised Land" with a passage from the book, the most direct "reading" he gives all night. He describes that first cross-country trip, "where I saw the United States at its fullest, and I was overwhelmed by its beauty." It's a good example of the show's deft mixing of moods that, after cracking the audience up with a story of making that haul without a driver's license ("I had never driven a block… I drove halfway across the country, in a '40s manual-transmission truck"), he intones this passage from the book: